(C) Daily Montanan This story was originally published by Daily Montanan and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . If first you don't succeed, keep trying at taxpayers' expense – Daily Montanan [1] ['More From Author', 'December', 'Darrell Ehrlick'] Date: 2023-12-28 Recently, some Republicans in the Legislature have been whining about all the (choose from any of these insults as needed) liberal, activist, dark-money, socialist, special-interest groups that have been suing the bejeezus out of the state for what is going on years now. Why, to listen to them tell it, citizens and agitators are just clobbering the courts with legal challenges to all of their benevolent laws. Like any great deception, its core is the truth, wrapped in several layers of falsehoods and inaccuracies. Yes, the Republicans are correct: All sorts of Montana groups and individuals have challenged a mountain of laws passed by the Legislature, both on the state and federal level. In fact, many of those challenges, borne out of the 2021 Legislature, are still being litigated, with the “Class of ‘23” beginning to wind their way through the courts. After that, the GOP narrative departs conveniently from the truth. At the Daily Montanan, we’ve covered these lawsuits from the initial court filings all the way to what often is the final decision handed down by the Montana Supreme Court, itself often vilified by the same Republican leaders for doing their job by following the law. I would bet no small sum of money that the reporters not just with our organization, but many other journalists in the state, have spent more time wading through these court filings, sitting in court, and interviewing the respective attorneys than any lawmaker who helped create the raft of regressive and often illegal bills, including drag bans, a TikTok ban, unscientific definitions of male and female, abortion, more abortion, and an outdoors policy that usually goes something like: If it has four legs, shoot it. And, so when leaders bemoan the often inevitable legal conclusions that come from awful legislation, many lawmakers haven’t had the benefit of watching the court hearings or reading the filings, replete with case law, that help courts arrive at their impartial decision. The leaders who cry crocodile tears about getting pummeled in court tell a sympathetic story: All their hard work undone by other attorneys and activist judges. But all this is a ruse, a smokescreen. Instead, here’s the other part of the story conveniently left off their narrative. We have tracked dozens and dozens of lawsuits that have spun out of these two highly-charged political sessions, and it’s hard to think of any notable victories for laws that have survived serious court challenges. Keep in mind, these cases have been tried from Kalispell to Billings to Helena to Butte. They’ve been tried in federal court as well as state court. To allege that all of these cases, written and promoted by so many different Republicans, and handled by a such a wide array of judges, have been struck down just because of an activist, liberal judiciary is to suggest a plot or conspiracy so widespread that it would require nearly everyone who dons a black robe to go along with it. What makes for a great political sound bite evaporates under the sunlight of scrutiny. Instead, there’s another much more plausible solution: Attorneys who work for the Legislature, as it drafts and thinks through these public policies that become law, routinely warn lawmakers that the bills they’re drafting are likely unconstitutional or illegal. These “legal notes” that accompany such troubled legislation were, not so long ago, seen by leadership as veritable scarlet letters on bills that would doom their chances of legislative survival. Often, legislators would go back, work on the bills so that those legal concerns would be assuaged. But that has changed: Now, when attorneys who are trying to warn lawmakers, many of whom do not have formal legal education, that what they’re suggesting is facially problematic, likely illegal, Republican lawmakers seem to relish the note, while they seize the opportunity to pass such legislation exactly to stick it to “libs” or “activist judges.” In other words: They’re writing and passing (and by extension, Gov. Greg Gianforte is helping this political strategy by signing) laws they know have little chance of surviving any sort of legal challenge. But they’re not writing law to help Montanans live better or more freely, they’re doing it to create a device to otherwise discredit the judiciary or win a future political battle. Or, they’re willing to pass a legion of likely unconstitutional bills, betting that most — but importantly, not all — of those suspect bills will be stopped, leaving a few to slip into law. They’re betting that Montanans are too busy or too trusting to read the bills or do the research themselves. Legislative leaders are hoping that the “R” behind their name is enough to simply take their word for it. Lest you wonder if this is some liberal apology for the court – the Republicans in the Legislature are betrayed by their own reckless spending of taxpayer dollars. Seeing the mounting costs of defending their legally dubious laws, the Montana Legislature set aside even more of your tax dollars to defend its own actions. In other words, it anticipated the challenges that would result by their bad laws, and then set aside more money — several million to help defend the legally unjustifiable. The solution to this problem is easy: The legislative leadership can either listen to the staff of experts that already work for them, a cheap and effective solution. Or, it can work on issues that need legislative remedies like saddling Montana residential property taxpayers with breathtakingly high increases while allowing the largest companies in the state to pay less. Or, it could continue its very respectable bipartisan work on things like mental health and provider rate support, or fixing the state’s broken prisons, and abandon its fruitless war against LGBTQ+ people, abortion and the environment. And hey, Republicans: No one will accuse of you of not trying. Heck, we paid for the opportunity for you to craft and pass the legislation. And we’ve subsidized your repeated defeats in court. [END] --- [1] Url: https://dailymontanan.com/2023/12/28/if-first-you-dont-succeed-keep-trying-at-taxpayers-expense/ Published and (C) by Daily Montanan Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/montanan/